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fohara

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Founder of fixture.dev : learn how to break software.

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Electron 6.0 7 years ago

I'm surprised Kivy [0] doesn't get more attention for desktop app development. Apps are developed in Python, it's cross-platform and MIT licensed. Running the hello world example uses just ~2.5% cpu and ~57mb memory on a 2015 mbp.

[0] https://github.com/kivy/kivy

I'm wondering how this compares to Xtext[1], which is another framework for developing domain specific languages. Xtext feels more approachable to me, but maybe that's because there appears to be a lot more documentation and tooling.

For example, the docs on Xtext's grammar language[2] seem very intuitive to me, even though I'm not experienced in compilers or language design. I don't have quite the same intuition when looking over the AnyDSL docs[3]. Maybe the Xtext docs are just more goal-oriented, i.e. "Five simple steps to your first language".

[1] https://eclipse.org/Xtext/index.html [2] https://eclipse.org/Xtext/documentation/301_grammarlanguage.... [3] https://github.com/AnyDSL/anydsl/wiki/Tutorial

I think this is solid advice. I continue learning by picking problems/inconveniences I encounter while working during the day, and then doing whatever research is required to make those things less inconvenient. In the process of researching the problem space, I'm often introduced to new programming concepts and tools that I would have otherwise never known about. Overall, I find it easier to learn new things if I have a real problem I'm trying to solve.